Mother
by SawyerRaleigh
Summary: A set of short drabbles exploring the significance of mothers to the dragons.


_Author's Note: I have no idea what prompted me to write this story but I could not help but feel rather sad as I wrote each one of these little drabbles... :( but on the plus side, my wordcount is up to 23,312 now! XD_

_Oh and no, this is not all of the characters. I only did the ones whose relationship with their mother or mother-figure was ever really mentioned.  
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Kamui

When he thought of his mother, he remembered sad, beautiful eyes. Lately when he looked in the mirror he saw those eyes staring back at him.

She was always cool and distant, but Kamui never doubted that his mother loved him. There were wonderfully sweet afternoons in the kitchen baking cookies sometimes where it was as though the dolor that forever haunted her had been temporarily shooed away by the sticky smile of a child. There were nights when dreams turned sour and scaly monsters reached out to torment him, sending him scurrying into his mother's bed to be held by protective arms. Those were the times he knew, with absolute certainty, that his mother loved him.

He loved her too.

He had always childishly believed that she was invincible, the one who would always patiently watch over him, until the day he could grow up to be _her_ protection, his mother's little prince. He had imagined himself bravely slaying dragons for her, a shining hero she could always count on. Some hero he turned out to be, that he could not even protect her from the dragon's fire. Even worse, now he knew that he was the dragon.

He missed her, his one companion throughout friendless childhood years before the Monou family, His support, both emotional and material for the first fifteen years of his life. Sometimes it hit him with breath-taking force.

He missed her.

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Kotori

She looked like her mother. Everyone thought so, even if they didn't say so out loud for fear of upsetting her. What they did not know was just how deeply that similarity ran. Her inheritance from her mother was not the long waves of hair meandering down her back but the subtly concealed gift that only she could know in her dreams.

She remembered the day she found opened the door to the sitting room to see blood splattered across the walls and everything grew hazy as a little bird, its body broken and twisted lay in her arms and strings of fate hung strewn across the room like horrible spider webs, waiting to catch Kotori herself.

She knew… she knew she was not well. But as the world had snapped and something in her broke, Kotori thought of her mother.

Father was gone, gone, gone… like birdies flown away for the winter. And mother was gone too. Except she wasn't. She was right here in front of her, hair billowing in the water, her chest bare straight down to her waist where shimmering scales marked the beginning of a winding tail with dancing gossamer fins.

Mother told her that she was going to die for the person that she loved. Just like mother had… Kotori had gasped in shock when Mother told her that she had loved Aunt Tooru, but deep down she was not surprised at all. She could see things too, had noticed things herself. She had known all along that Father was not her Mother's one and only. It didn't really matter though. Father was Father and Mother was Mother and koi were koi, tickling her cheek as they brushed past, darting off when she giggled.

She was going to do just what Mother did soon. Soon, she knew, Kamui would make his decision and she would have to go away forever.

It was so pretty the way the water danced under her fingertips and the way the light formed shimmering webs in its waves…

So soon she would be with Mother and Father again.

She laughed as Kamui lifted her out of the water, loving the way his eyes sparkled like the sky, the sky where birds flew away so freely… such pretty little birds.

She knew it wouldn't last much longer.

After all, she was her mother's daughter.

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Seishirou

"_I wanted her smile, not to get it but to have it."_

He had loved the way his mother smiled. It was a beautiful smile flavored with serenity, innocence, culpability, and secrets. He remembered the first time he had met her, how she had smiled at him.

"_What a beautiful little boy."_

_A porcelain hand ran delicate fingertips down his cheek, tracing a faint line to his jaw._

"_You would be much prettier covered in blood though."_

Spoken, as all her silky words were, with a smile.

From that moment he had longed to make that smile his own.

He had loved his mother; rare be it to find a child who didn't. Indeed, there was even something rather innocent in his love for her, a kind of truthfulness in which he did not often partake. Even in the sensuality she fostered in him that in his teenage years bloomed into sexuality, there was a sort of innocence. He wanted to please, had always wanted to please her, to earn that smile so that he might have more opportunity to observe and to mimic.

The patience with which he met her every whim, societally acceptable or not, nurtured the same patience he later applied to his prey and the grace that defined her every move, even in violence, he adapted to his own limbs and person, never abandoning it even when delivering a killing blow.

He had learned well from his mother.

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Subaru

For most of his life, when he thought of the word "mother", he did not think of the woman who gave birth to him, but of Hokuto and his grandmother.

Subaru didn't actually remember his biological mother, but he remembered the woman who raised him, provided for him physically and taught him the ways of an onmyouji and society at large as well as the girl who was his emotional support, the one who taught him the ways of the heart.

He had not spoken to his grandmother in months, ashamed to be near her after all that he has turned his back on the family he was raised to one day take control of. And Hokuto…

He remembered his grandmother's strict teachings, although he could sense an affection behind her that motivated her into teaching him well. He knew she only wanted to provide him with the tools he would need to be a good onmyouji, a good head of the Sumeragi clan, and a good man. It seemed now like he was throwing all of that careful planning back in her face and he guiltily avoided facing her. Still she called almost every single day, begging him to return home, to give up this "wild goose chase" of his. He wasn't sure what he was more afraid of; that she would admonish him for disappearing to Tokyo like this… or that she would forgive him for it.

Hokuto… the one whose face had once been his mirror, she too had been in the care of Lady Sumeragi. Some days Subaru could not shake the feeling that he had gotten her daughter killed. Other days it was his own mother whose death he felt personally responsible for. After all, it had been Hokuto who had so vivaciously supported his relationship with Seishirou. And it was Hokuto who had paid for his indulgence.

So what did Subaru think of now when he thought of a mother?

He thought of guilt.

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Arashi

Her memories of her real mother have grown hazy over the years but when she does remember her, Arashi remembers desperation and fierceness. Arashi knows her mother died to protect her but she does not remember how anymore.

No one could ever replace Mother to her but the priestesses who took her in will always have a special place in her heart as well. She remembers with perfect clarity what it was like living on the street at seven years old, struggling to fend for herself and she would always be incredibly grateful to the priestess who not only found her and brought inside where it was warm and dry, but also gave her a reason to want to live.

She had taught Arashi to accept things calmly, as still as a glassy surface of water herself, and over the years she had felt her stormy past dissolve into smooth waters, giving her the stability to handle her life and destiny with grace.

The priestess had since passed away; her health had taken a sudden downward turn a little over a year ago and Arashi had done her best to bear the pain of loss with all the quiet serenity that she had learned from her.

No one could ever replace her mother. But no one could ever replace the priestess to her either.

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Sorata

The only memory Sorata has of his mother now is of her weeping in his father's arms as the monks led him away by one hand. He vaguely remembers missing her at first as he struggled to adjust to life at the monastery but he was so young that he had adapted remarkably quickly. Thus for the majority of his childhood, Sorata had no mother, but he had no regrets about that either because it was made up for by his roughly a dozen fathers as far as he was concerned. He simply did not mind that he had no mother.

Over the years, the scant memories of the mother he had once had faded away and he almost never thought about it at all. He had not thought about mothers in many years, truth be told.

Now though, now he was beginning to think about them again, trying hard to recall what his own was like, and what the few mothers he had witnessed interacting with their children in public were like. He wondered what exactly made a good mother. He had begun to wonder because now when he looked at Arashi he imagined a mother.

He knew he was destined to die for the sake of a woman, and he had decided it would be Arashi no matter what. Yet lately he often found himself hoping and praying that that day would not come for many more years. He hoped they would save the world, and life would go on so that he and Arashi could get married and find themselves a gorgeous house in the countryside together. They could even go all westerner and get a white picket fence for it if they had a yard to put it up around.

And in that yard…

In that yard, he could just imagine children playing, happily chasing one another, or playing pretend, or simply lying in the grass, finding shapes in the clouds.

He wanted that future, and what was more, he wanted it with Arashi.

So he would continue to hope, and continue to fight to protect the world they lived in, so that maybe, just maybe, one day she would be a mother… and he would be a father.

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Nataku

When Nataku hears the word "mother", he closes his eyes and he sees red curls and a warm smile. He dreams about his mother, and he sees a mother, and even though they do not look the same, Nataku secretly knows that they are.

He remembers being held in a part of warm arms, soft, gentle hands rubbing his back. When Karen reaches up to place a palm against his cheek, he knows it's the same. The concern in her eyes, the genuine worry for his well-being, is filled with familiarity for him. When anxieties gnawing away at him as the confusion of everything that has happened since he escaped from the lab overwhelm him, her voice soothes him. It all takes him home, to safety, a place where he knows that everything is going to be okay, because mother is there.

He has never heard the words "maternal instinct before", but he recognizes it when he sees it. And like a harmless moth to a flame, he is drawn to her.

He wants her to always be that way. He wants her to always hold him like this, stroking his hair as she cradles his head in her lap.

The world is growing darker even as she is asking father "why". Nataku doesn't know what they are talking about, their voices are becoming strangely muffled. But it's okay, he's safe. And he's warm. He vaguely recalls a warm, dark, muffled place like this. Being safe with mother like this before he was born. He had no idea that dying would be like this too, like returning to the safe, dark place.

He smiles softly, happy to be returning to Mother.

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Karen

Whenever something reminded Karen of her mother, she instinctively longed for Paul, her worn-out teddy bear and most faithful companion even after all these years.

She remembered nights spent crying under the covers, clutching desperately at Paul as if he could heal the bruises that peppered her tiny body.

She had wanted to help her mother. She knew she had been sad ever since Papa left them and that things had been difficult for her as a single parent and a foreigner in Japan, standing out with her firey red hair. The little flames that had flared to life before her eyes at her will had come as a delight to Karen. They were beautiful, and she had thought that Mama would be happy to see something so pretty that her daughter could make for her. Not only that, they could also keep the two of them warm when the nights got cold and Mama could not afford the electric bill again.

She had never expected to be punished for doing what came so naturally especially as she had never meant any harm by it.

Yet despite her mother's abuse, Karen still loved her fiercely and that would never change. She knew her mother had worked hard to do right by her, she simply had not understood Karen's special ability. How could she have? She had no way of knowing anything about the Dragons of Heaven and Earth.

So Karen vowed that one day she would look after her own children just as Mama had looked after her except that she would accept them for whoever they chose to be, whatever talents they might have. She would never punish her children for being good at something. It was a child's vow, but one she intended to keep even now.

And she did want children now. Even as the world crumbled around them all, a quiet little clock ticked impatiently in her, demanding that she bring a new life to the forsaken earth, one that would be filled with the kind desperate hope and determination the future needed right now.

She longed to nurture, to protect, to love. She needed to be needed. She refrained from following that desire, aware that it was far from practical right now, but it still burned brightly in her heart.

So when the quiet boy with the soft lavender eyes appeared, she felt an instant connection. She could sense a lonely child within him and the lonely mother in her cried out in response. She had known the grief of a lost and motherless child.

And now, as the boy lay still in her arms, she knew the grief of a lost and childless mother.

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End file.
